Ueno Zoo doesn’t feel like it’s in the center of Tokyo. The thick woods have massive trees, some of which are more than 400 years old. And there’s a big lake holding thousands of tons of water. There’s such a wealth of luxuriant nature. The zoo takes care of about 3,000 individual creatures, representing 400 species. Apart from these residents, there is also a thriving population of wildlife that varies around the year, including the cormorants, herons, and coots that regularly visit the zoo. In fact, Ueno Zoo has such a diversity of life that it resembles a planet in its own right. Based on that realization, I attempted to consolidate its energy into a single picture, making a line drawing with a massive number of fine lines.
To provide a different perspective, I abandoned the familiar human view and drew the zoo from the viewpoint of a bird flying above. Ueno Zoo is Japan’s oldest zoo, and has the largest number of visitors. That makes it very familiar, and most Japanese people feel that they already know the zoo well. But by looking at it from a different angle, it becomes an unknown world, a place full of all sorts of things that you didn’t know about. This project was an attempt to discover the new values that are hidden there.